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Cambodian Americans graduate from college at a lower rate than most Asian American groups. This qualitative study involved interviewing five current Cambodian American college students. This study examined how participants' high school experiences contributed to their decisions to go to college and to study STEM fields, how parental influences guided participants to college, and how college experiences influenced their decisions to stay and succeed in STEM fields. Findings from this study suggest: having supportive teachers in high school may have been important in motivating participants to go to college and to study STEM Fields, Cambodian parents tell stories of their lives in Cambodia to motivate their children to go to college, and Cambodian club on campus was a socially and academically supportive place.

In this thesis, I explore two works from Mail Order Brides/M.O.B., A Public Message for Your Private Life (1998) and Mail Order Bride of Frankenstein (2003), that take into account the histories and identities produced within Filipino/a American Communities. I use Sarita Echavez See and Emily Noelle Ignacio's theories on parody to analyze the performative aspects of M.O.B's artworks. According to See and Ignacio, parody can be utilized as a tool to simultaneously form solidarity within Filipino American communities. By examining these ideas, I argue that M.O.B. performs appropriated representations of their ethnic and assimilated cultures by using parody to critique and problematize often-misrepresented individual and cultural identities.

The purpose of this grant was to design a psychoeducational workshop for South Asian immigrant families. The literature review goes over cultural factors that play a part in making the transition difficult to immigrating to a Western country. A search for potential funders was done by going on California State University Long Beach library website. This allowed the grantwriter to create a list of potential funders. The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation's focus on children, families, culture, and the underserved populations made it the best choice. The grantwriter chose to collaborate with the South Asian Network in Artesia, California. It is a nonprofit organization that has the ability to serve people in nine different languages. Actual submission of this grant was not required for the completion of this project.

The purpose of this project was to develop and write a grant proposal to secure funds on behalf of the Herald Community Center for a psycho-educational program for Chinese adults providing direct care for aging parents. The proposed program entitled Caring for You, Caring for Me will focus on Chinese caregivers residing in the San Gabriel Valley. Traditionally, families of Chinese descent encounter numerous barriers when attempting to access support services for their aging parents. These barriers can include financial strain on the family caregiver, language incompatibility with service providers, and a lack of cultural responsiveness to the needs of the Chinese older adult community. The overarching goal of the proposed program will be to decrease the burden and stress often experienced by Chinese adult children in a caregiving role. The actual submission or funding for this program was not required for the completion of this project.

This study explored the experience of Asian American mothers raising children with Autistic Disorder. The cultural and traditional beliefs regarding mental disorders were examined along with the personal, social, and cultural experience of raising children with Autistic Disorder. This study found common themes shared among Asian American mothers in their understanding, perspective, parenting styles, distressing factors, cultural beliefs, and values of Autistic Disorder. This study included 10 Asian American mothers with children under the age of 10 years who were diagnosed with Autistic Disorder. The results reflect the unique cultural experiences that Asian American mothers have in raising children with Autistic Disorder due to cultural factors and influences. Asian American mothers in this study experienced heightened stress, negative and difficult emotions, depression, grief, marital, cultural, and familial pressure to raise high-achieving children, and marital discord, all while experiencing the pressure to provide 100% dedication to care for their children diagnosed with Autistic Disorder. Results indicated Asian American mothers do encounter specific experiences that are unique, due to the cultural demands and expectations of raising children with Autistic Disorder. An explanation of the results, implications for practice, and potential areas of future research are also discussed.

The purpose of this project was to locate a potential funding source and write a grant to propose funding for a mental health outreach program aimed towards increasing mental health awareness in Asian American parents. An extensive literature review was performed to understand the prevalence of mental health related issues in the Asian American community. The goals of the project are to increase mental health awareness in Los Angeles County, increase positive communication between Asian American parents and children, and to decrease mental health stigma. The outreach program seeks to achieve said goals by providing educational and informational seminars to the local schools, businesses, community centers, religious organizations and Asian radio stations. The actual submission and/or funding of this grant was not a requirement for the successful completion of the project.

Writing about food and eating food are both environmental acts. The ways in which humans conceive of edible material—by speaking about it and growing it in the ground—are reflections of their view of the natural world.

Ecological fiction like Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest connects imagined visions of food with the current reality of our agricultural system in the United States. In both the fictitious narratives and lived experience, synthetic polymers overtake almost every aspect of life, including edible matter. The ubiquitous plasticization of food is one of the main causes of the current global environmental crisis.

Ultimately, the treatment of food in ecological fiction and in practice reveals our mistreatment of the environment and of our own bodies. Employing a systems-based way of thinking ecologically make visible the yet invisible lines of interconnection among the natural world, edible matter, and living beings.

This dissertation explores language as a resource for the formation and expression of ethnic identity among the members of an Asian American college sorority. As a community of practice organized around ethnicity, the sorority provides an excellent site to examine the mutually constitutive relationship of language and ethnic identity. Two features of the sorority members' speech are analyzed in detail: their pronunciation of the mid-back rounded GOAT vowel, and their prosodic rhythm. For both variables, the behavior of the sorority members is compared with that of college peers of both Asian and non-Asian descent. The results indicate that both segmental and suprasegmental features are available as markers of Asian American ethnicity, and that the association of linguistic features with ethnicity is mediated by group membership and region, among other factors.

The community of study is an Asian-interest sorority at a large public university in New Jersey. The data are drawn from two main sources: participant observation of sorority activities and one-on-one sociolinguistic interviews. The ethnographic observations allow the behaviors and beliefs of the sorority members to be situated in the local context of the school, the state, and the region. The interview data, meanwhile, provide high-quality spontaneous speech data for phonetic analysis. It is argued that it is only through an understanding of the particular social context in which speakers exist that their linguistic behavior can be understood; conversely, examining linguistic behavior can illuminate how identity categories such as "Asian American" are construed and enacted within a given social setting.

The segmental variable analyzed in this study is the realization of the mid-back rounded vowel in the GOAT class of words. A quantitative analysis shows that the sorority members produce a more backed and monophthongal GOAT vowel than their non-Asian peers. In previous work, the fronting of GOAT has been noted as an ongoing change in certain regional dialects in the United States; however, the present analysis shows that sorority members tend to produce backer GOAT vowels than non-Asian speakers regardless of region.

The suprasegmental variable analyzed is prosodic rhythm, which refers to the relative length of adjacent syllables in speech. English is typically described as a stress-timed language, with stressed syllables being much longer than unstressed syllables. However, the sorority members' speech shows characteristics of syllable timing, with stressed and unstressed syllables being of roughly equal length. This finding coincides with those for other varieties of English, including Hispanic English and Singapore English. It is argued that syllable timing in English is likely a substrate effect from syllable-timed heritage languages, including Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean. Individual differences in prosodic rhythm are also examined with respect to age of acquisition and other inter- and intraspeaker factors.

This dissertation draws on multiple research traditions in the study of language and identity: it is an ethnographic description of a community of practice as well as a sociophonetic study of regionally and ethnically linked variables. It is also a study of young women's language at a critical stage of identity formation—the college years. Additionally, this dissertation is part of a growing body of sociolinguistic research on Asian Americans, a group that until recently has been drastically understudied. As a group with tremendous internal diversity, Asian Americans present both challenges and opportunities for the study of language and ethnicity. This dissertation thus advances sociolinguistic research in two ways: one, by shedding light on the language practices of this rapidly growing population, and two, by contributing to our overall understanding of how language interacts with various facets of identity, including ethnic identity.

This thesis highlights a method of representation that is critical of both images of Chinese powerlessness and images of Chinese power. In Chan is Missing and The Princess of Nebraska, two films by Chinese American director Wayne Wang, representations of Chineseness and Chinese identity are always determined through the discursive context in which they are enunciated. The films each employ the device of a missing subject, in order to show that its meaning does not refer to the subject itself but rather is determined through the context in which it is talked about. This creates different and often conflicting versions of the same subject, which can only be resolved by seeing that the subjects of Chineseness and Chinese identity are always a response to the contexts out of which they are discussed.

This dissertation addresses the formation of scholar identity as informed by an identity- conscious approach to doctoral student socialization, doctoral student development, and racial identity as expressed through the critical narratives of Asian American and Pacific Islander doctoral students in the field of higher education. The study explored the intersections of race, doctoral student socialization, and doctoral student development — three areas that have been approached as separate entities in existing literature. By using life history methodology and narrative inquiry, this study contributed to a more thorough understanding of racialized experiences in doctoral studies. Critical narrative was used as a methodological approach concerned with power and language in society where individuals can concretely question their own realities and identify the socio-ideological influence of systems on their practices and beliefs (Souto-Manning, 2012). Rather than use terminology of counter-narrative, which positions a narrative as counter to an existing dominant narrative, the use of critical narrative is highlighted as a way to position the stories of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders as their own central story. This inquiry advances our understanding of ways to create and sustain more inclusive and engaging learning environments that support racial diversity in higher education and to better understand the barriers that have socially and historically marginalized Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders both in general and in doctoral education. Recommendations for practice include developing identity-conscious approaches to scholar formation, including but not limited to inclusive pedagogy and curriculum; mentoring and advising; culturally affirming networks; program and organizational orientation; and doctoral student support. A model of identity-conscious scholar formation is presented in which socialization, development, and racial identity must be operationalized as bidirectional and interactional processes.